"Like I told you before, there were shapes but that was all. It was too dark. Maybe they came in through another entrance?" Buchan said hopefully. "They might have seen the attack coming and couldn't make it back there--"
"All access points are sealed," Drew told him harshly. "Nobody has entered the complex. Nobody. If Stuermer and Monteith went out, they're still out!"
Chase stepped forward, pointing at the control box. "Hit it!"
Buchan started as if jabbed with a needle, pressed the green button with the heel of his hand, and the lightly greased shaft slid upward accompanied by the whine of hydraulics. Buchan pulled the ribbed rubber handgrips horizontal and locked them in position, then stood aside as Chase pressed his forehead to the molded foam rubber and adjusted the focus. It was like looking into a thin gray mist. Against the flat colorless backdrop he could just make out a group of shadowy figures. He turned the calibrated setting to greater magnification and faces loomed in close-up. The skin on the back of his neck crawled. He swallowed a lump of phlegm in his throat.
There were eight or nine of them as near as he could tell. Pitted and scarred like lepers and dressed in rags, they were huddled around a pathetic fire from which a thin trickle of smoke ascended into the whitening sky. He hadn't expected this; whatever he had been prepared for it wasn't children. The oldest was about fifteen. Some of the others were no more than ten, and one, a girl, little more than a toddler. He didn't want to look and yet his eye was held compulsively by each disgusting detail. A head with the flesh hanging off it like strips of yellow tissue paper. A boy with milky-white eyeballs staring emptily into the distance. A girl with scabrous patches of raw flesh on her back and buttocks. Some with a black fungal growth obliterating their face. At least four that he could see with fingers or hands or complete limbs missing, leaving only raw stumps through which the pale bone gleamed.
And in every eye--even the blind boy--a kind of bloodlust madness that made Chase break out in a cold sweat and his testicles shrivel.
The bloodlust was real, not his imagination. Near the fire lay two corpses, crudely dismembered. They still had heads, but their tatters of brown tunics swathed armless shoulders and their empty trousers were ripped open to the crotch. The children had divided the spoils, holding their portions on pointed sticks close to the paltry flames and crunching and chewing with rapt concentration and ravenous enjoyment.
Chase moved away and leaned against the wall. Pearls of sweat covered his face and neck. He didn't say anything, couldn't, as Drew gripped the handles and looked into the eyepiece.
The three men in the concrete cubicle with its garish contorting nudes stood without moving. Distantly, like snapping twigs, they heard the spasmodic stutter of automatic weapons, followed by the fading reverberations across the flat landscape. They heard the screams, too. Muffled by the steel and concrete surrounding them, they reminded Chase of sea gulls whooping and crying in a parody of human pain. Then the screams were not muffled but loud--much louder--as the guards in the corridor slid open the heavy steel door and charged bulk-ily up the sandblown steps, rifles and machine pistols spitting death.
No one in the cubicle wanted to witness the carnage thirty feet above his head. Imagining it was as bad, perhaps worse. Chase and Drew still felt sickened by the images of those grotesque children, while Buchan had refused to look.
Moments later the firing ceased.
Chase wiped his face and neck with his wadded handkerchief.
Would he have experienced less guilt, less responsibility, if they had been adults and not children? Common looters or a drunken mob?
But there were no comfortable, or comforting, rules anymore, no genteel morality. The only rules, the only morality, concerned survival at all costs. The freakish children had lost their claim to humanity when the sulfur dioxide had corroded their tissues and the needles of ultraviolet radiation had lanced through the depleted ozone layer into their brain cells, corrupting each cell with cancerous madness. Given the chance, Chase knew, the children wouldn't have stopped until the Tomb lived up to its name.
He followed Drew into the corridor and up the ramp. The air was cool and would have been refreshing had it not been for the rich taint of roasting flesh.
"Where do you suppose they came from?" Drew asked in a low voice. He was pale, his thick eyebrows like an unbroken dark bar.
Chase shrugged listlessly as he mounted the steps. "I've no idea. Down south somewhere. You can't trust government reports anymore. They say that the Devastated Areas don't extend north of Little Rock, but for all we know they could be twenty miles from here. Right on our doorstep."
